Robertas Narkus

– curated by Juste Kostikovaite

Turbulence 3

8 March 2014

Event: 7 – 9pm

The value of any situation is dictated by an infinite number of factors beyond an individual’s control. Affirming an object, action or event with a static value necessarily defines it as ordinary. Robertas Narkus describes his practice as ‘management of chance in an economy of circumstance’. He brings together the ordinary and absurd to explore notions of uncertainty, chance and symbolic capital through unexpected collaborations. In Turbulence 3, Narkus proposes to lead his audience to a position beyond description.

Turbulence 3

– Captain! We are late because all clocks show the percentage of the fat in the milk you just poured into your coffee. But, you know, the problem with the milk is that once you pour it into coffee you can never unmix it. That's the law. And don't try to blame anyone for that. It's molecules and their movements that are responsible for it.

– Forget about it. Do I have to remind you that we're part of an isolated system; no matter how high the definition or how large the resolution, there are still decisions to make. We're still alive. But there is a limited number of possible movements, before the sun reaches ‘superposition’, before things get really turbulent again.

– I agree. Can you see these islands formed from trash down there? Rotating slowly in a spiral, forming new continents, new territories for new life, better art, more confidence, softer skin.

Robertas Narkus (b. 1983) lives in Vilnius and Amsterdam. He graduated from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam in 2014.

In May 2013 he established the Institute of Pataphysics in Vilnius, and published his new book, Management of Circumstances in early 2014. Recent exhibitions include Half Hotel, a parallel project for the fifth Marrakech Biennale (2014); EXILE, Rupert Project Space, Vilnius; ANNE, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius; FAST FLUX, Studio-X, New York (all 2013); Chance No 6/Red Herring, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius; Whatever or synoptics of uncertainty, POT, Kassel; Chance No 5, Oksasenkatu 11, Helsinki (all 2012); Generation of the Place: Image, Memory and Fiction in the Baltics, Tallinn Kunsthalle (2011); and "Stop! Qui vive?", the second Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2010).